Coding, Snowsports, Politics, Miscellanea

Pondering Patterns

It’s been something like 11 or 12 years since I first heard of the book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. It was around the time I was beginning to realise there might be something to this idea of object-oriented software development.

I’ve been pondering patterns ever since.

For those not aware of patterns (where have you been?), the idea stems from architecture of the physical building kind. People realised that there was a set of principles that had formed based on common solutions to common problems. You don’t stick a door there, you don’t put a window here, you need X number of columns for this, you need Y whenever you have a Z. You can probably tell why I never became an architect… but you get the idea. It encapsulated and documented a collective knowledge and experience of the process of architecture.

Humans have been building houses, fortresses and temples for thousands of years. That’s a lot of experience and knowledge we’ve accumulated about what we should and shouldn’t do. But when it comes to building software, we’ve only got a few decades under our belts. Much as we’d love to think of it as a mature and sophisticated process, it isn’t. When I left university, I was convinced software development was an engineering process – but the real world taught me that it just doesn’t fit well. It’s not a science either, despite my computer science degree. As a trained artist, I’d like to say it’s an art but that’s a simplification. And then someone mentioned a craft, and that is currently the best way to sum up what I do for a living. But even that isn’t a perfect analogy.

Anyway, I’ve diverged a bit. The “Gang of Four” made an attempt to encapsulate a set of knowledge and experience from software development in the same way architects had done, and that knowledge is present in their book “Design Patterns”. It’s a fascinating book to have on your book shelf and, in my mind, it presents two very important bits of information to programmers: a selection of solved problems and a vocabulary for programmers.

Solved problems are good. There’s no point wasting time re-inventing the wheel unless you can build a much, much better one. The Internet has given us a rich, supplemental way to seek out solutions to problems or advice on how best to approach common situations. The growth of free and open source software gives developers access to the real shared knowledge and literature of programming: the source code. We lead busy lives and the business wants results yesterday, so knowledge of what is a solved problem is good to have because it’s one less thing to worry about and we can concentrate on the other stuff.

The vocabulary aspect is one that often gets overlooked by people talking about patterns. Even before I discovered the ideas behind domain driven design, I’d been interested in the idea of a “ubiquitous language”, a shared glossary between developers, domain experts and users that would allow all three to communicate effectively. Too many software projects fail because of the lack of communication or, perhaps worse, misinterpreted communication. While patterns might not hold to all three types of people mentioned, they do provide a shared terminology for developers to talk to each other about common solutions. At least your developers all understand each other, right?

So patterns are a good thing then? Well, yes and no. “Design Patterns” is a fascinating book to have on your shelf, and that’s ultimately where it resides. I actually read it all the way through just after I bought it and went “great!”. I dipped into it maybe two or three times in the space of a few months afterwards and that was it. It now sits there nestled between “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” and “Refactoring”. Don’t ask about my elaborate book ordering system.

So what’s wrong with patterns? Well, nothing intrinsically. As I said earlier, it provides a repository of shared knowledge/experience in solved problems, and it encourages a shared language between developers. Both of which are good. Trust me.

Let’s take the shared language idea first as it’s a bit of a flimsy argument. Most, but definitely not all, developers I’ve worked with either haven’t heard of patterns or don’t know them off by heart. I know I don’t remember all the names. That’s mainly an education issue, rather than a problem with patterns, but it puts a barrier between people – it can even be taken as a mild form of elitism. You can shove your Flyweight Pattern up your Chain of Responsibility, they say. Maybe.

Even amongst those of us “in the know”, a problem is rarely a pure example of one of the patterns so we end up adding extensions to what we’re saying. In fact, it’s often more comfortable slipping from pure Patternspeak to Domainspeak. It’s not a Command pattern, it’s an Order Request or a Unicorn Disposal. Or we go low-level and discuss language features. The Patternspeak abstraction sits in a middle ground between domain language (understandable by the business) and implementation language (understandable by geeks and compilers).

Defining language and process has an unusual side-effect in that it sets an, often arbitrary, limit on creativity. Much as there is still a school of thought that programming can be defined without the need for creativity, that is nonsense – it’s problem-solving, and problem-solving often cannot be described by a rigid formula or process. I laugh when I hear about ideas such as executable UML, because computer-assisted software engineering was The Next Big Thing when I was at university and we’re still waiting for it to deliver.

The risk with patterns is that developers can become restricted by them – they follow the pattern precisely, or refuse to see options beyond the documented patterns. Again, that’s not a problem with patterns as such, but the way they are used. Actually, it’s a limitation of the human mind – we tend to stay within our comfort zone and often stick to what we know, even when that knowledge doesn’t seem to be beneficial in the circumstances. We become blinkered.

Recently I heard mention of “refactoring to patterns”. I think it was on an episode of DotNetRocks, but I might be wrong. You write your code free from preconceived ideas. Strictly speaking, you write code confined by the limitations of your own experiences and knowledge (or that of your team). Actually, you write code based on the real problem at hand. Then you step back and realise you have a Facade, Memento, Syntax-Directed Translator, Service Stub or whatever, which may or may not be a help when refactoring your work to be cleaner, more elegant or more understandable. Or when discussing the problem with an “in-the-know” colleague.

The other thing I heard a couple of years ago was that patterns are language-dependent – and I’ll chip in the phrase “paradigm-dependent” too. Interesting idea. The clue was the Gang of Four’s subtitle “Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. Object-oriented development might have the mindshare these days, but C is still one of the most widespread languages and functional languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure and F# are rapidly becoming the cool kids on the block. The Gang’s patterns are based on their knowledge and experience of statically-typed, object-oriented languages.

Something that could be a pattern in C++ or Java, might be a simple bit of syntax in something like Python or Ruby. How do object-oriented patterns map to functional or procedural languages? What about for dynamically typed languages? Of course, they have their own patterns – I’ve seen Erlang patterns crop up on the mailing lists, decades of Lisp and Scheme pattern seep into Clojure, and even a minority of fellow Pythonistas claiming patterns don’t exist in Python. Wishful thinking guys – we just have different patterns. When put like that, the shared vocabulary and knowledge provided by patterns becomes more disperse – with maybe a tiny shared core somewhere in the murk.

In conclusion, reviewing my meandering and rambling, patterns are still a good thing because of the shared language and wisdom of solved problems. But they can be troublesome too, if used inappropriately. My copy of the book has “An Invitation” at the end which essentially says patterns are something you build up yourself, with those in the book as a starting point. It was something I’d forgotten about until I dusted off the book to sit beside me as I wrote this. I wonder how many others have forgotten this important piece of advice – or even missed it completely?

Think about the patterns in your own domain, your own choice of technology. Then think about the language you use to describe things to your fellow developers, your domain experts and your customers – are you all understanding each other? Really?